Manufacturing the Cloud: Location, Location, Location

With changes in the global economy making it increasingly difficult to plan anything long term with any certainty, the ability to be agile and to change plans quickly and cost-effectively becomes all the more important. NetSuite is inherently agile and not just because of our configurability (as covered in my last blog) but because your company information is centrally managed with reduced infrastructure.

Ownership of data is a question often raised by prospects during a sales cycle. Of course the data is always the property of the customer, but another aspect to this that is less commonly discussed is control of your data—in essence, your company’s intellectual property. With NetSuite, you have complete control over who has access to your data, what data they have access to and, possibly most important, when they have access to it—and all of that can be adapted in an instant, as business needs dictate.

Traditionally the task of adding (or moving) a subsidiary or location within an organization required months of planning to source and order new server hardware, allocate resources to configure it and most likely install client-side applications on every PC—with the inevitable problem that PCs won’t take kindly to the latest install.

With NetSuite, adding a new subsidiary or location is simply a matter of configuration—letting you focus on managing the business side of your new facility towards profitability. Take Groupon, for example. When they deployed NetSuite, they rolled it out in five countries in six weeks, and 26 countries within six months. That kind of accelerated growth and expansion (largely through acquisition) would simply not be possible with traditional on-premise applications. Or what about the myriad of companies that are considering relocating or bringing back at least some aspects of their production to North America. Its critical to have technology that facilitates this rather than hampers it. NetSuite was in its infancy when Bill Gates published the following in his 1999 book, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System:

"To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It's like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system—the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers."